One of the less documented changes to macOS Golden Gate is the removal of Apple Filing Protocol (AFP) as a supported network protocol. AFP was first introduced as part of Apple’s System 6 operating system in 1988 and was Apple’s primary network protocol for connecting to file services up through OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion.

Beginning with OS X Mavericks 10.9, Apple started transitioning file services to using Server Message Block (SMB) in place of AFP for both hosting file services and connecting to them from a Mac, but connecting to AFP file services continued to work in Mavericks and later versions of OS X and macOS. However, Apple signaled that AFP was completely on its way out when they included a note for macOS Sequoia 15.5 in the What’s new for enterprise in macOS Sequoia release notes that AFP was deprecated and would be removed in a future version of macOS.

Apple did not make further mention of the removal status in their posted documentation, but in macOS 26 Tahoe (the macOS version preceding Golden Gate), there is a warning which appears when you try to set up a Time Capsule for Time Machine backups. That warning states that next major version of macOS will no longer support AirPort Disk or other Time Capsule disks for Time Machine backups.

Time Capsules use AFP for their network file sharing, so this warning meant that AFP was likely gone in macOS 27 Golden Gate. This has proved to be the case for Golden Gate and support for AFP has been removed.